Addendum To Paragraph 54

42 ADDENDUM TO PARAGRAPH 54 Commenting upon cultural transformation and human rights in an African context, a recent book notes the dangers of imposing a Western human rights framework without sufficient attention to underlying African social realities. The author's caution is instructive in this case and can be related to the rather individualistic claim for social recognition based upon the subjectivized claim for recognition at the root of claim for a right to same-sex marriage:

The complex legal questions about the enduring nature of marriage and disputes over separation; of rights and duties in relation to children; about division of property and access to inheritance; about the duties between generations and kin in regard to mutual support are not soluble by the invocation of a rights paradigm [p.62]......[the author notes that] Part of the problem lies in the domination of the continent's political and social processes by Eurocentric norms and values [p. 85]...the family is considered sacred and ...it would be simply impracticable and suicidal for Africans to adopt wholesale the individualist conception of rights [that form the basis of rights discourse elsewhere] [p.87]...Individual rights are collective in their dimension. "[T]heir recognition, their mode of exercise and their means of protection' is a collective process requiring the intervention of other individuals, groups and communities (Maire 1986: 199). the past, as the Afrixans of old used to say, is part of the living. It ought to be used to construct a better tomorrow [p. 93].

Abdullahi A. An-Na'im Cultural Transformation and Human Rights in Africa (London: Zed Books Ltd., 2002).

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